Vera
Hermione had told him to start with facts, Ron had told him to start with what he felt, Sirius had told him to start where he wanted to and Draco, surprised to be asked, told him to start with something bloody.
It was only in the dark that it was whispered, by another potent voice, tell the story you need to tell. That worked.
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Once, far away, there was desert. It stretched for miles in every direction, sandy dunes and bright sun. In the desert, between two mountains of dust, a thin naked boy squatted to study a lizard and is scurried for shelter. Once it had disappeared, the boy remained and scratched idly at a healing cut, picking at the scab.
Living in the desert was harsh, he had to make do with what he could find. There was a trickle of water to be had in plants, some small game that could be eaten raw without making him ill and in the frozen nights, he would return to the small shelter he had made for himself out of woven plant fiber. It was a harsh life, but it was all he had ever known and it was good enough.
Nothing ever really changed, the scenery endlessly monotonous and the company any scuttling creature that he wouldn't eat. He did not keep track of days. There wasn't much point. He endured.
Then today...
Today something strange had happened. He was scratching words into the sand, a long fragmented sentence that strutted over the dune, when a rock thudded down next to him. It wasn't a particularly big rock, about the size of his palm, rounded and smooth. The ocean, he vaguely remembered, did that. Made things smooth. There weren't any rocks in his part of the desert. Only the endless sand. It had blue tinge. When he picked it up, it was astonishingly cool in his hands.
He had just held it for a long time, turning it over and over in his hands, but it stayed cool. Curious and a little afraid, he secreted it away in his shelter and went back to his only entertainment, scrawling endless poetry into the sand.
The words were his greatest gift and he used them as best he could. They made him feel real and alive. There was no one else to talk to, so he talked to himself. He wrote a longer poem then usual, it stretched the length of a dune and scattered haphazardly down the entire height. It was about the strange happening of the rock.
For dinner he picked at lizard scraps and that night, curling into the shelter, he held the rock.
A red one fell into his lap in the next morning. A green one in the late afternoon and then none for several days. He liked to rearrange them in the quiet shadow of his shelter.
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The parchment felt awkward underneath his fingers and there was ink smudging the side of his hand. The story hurt. The isolation, remembered, was too terrible to think about.
Keep going, smoky voice and the quill twitched.
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After a few sleeps and wakes, there were still no more rocks, so the boy decided they were never coming back. It was strange to have something to mourn, something that could be taken. Everything had already been stripped from him and he had forgotten pain.
He wrote no poetry, ate only what he had stored and stopped thinking for a long stretch of time.
When he woke to the blazing face of the sun, an interminable time after the first stone had dropped, he moved from the shelter to find the dune he wrote on covered in color. He approached cautiously and drawing closer, found they spelled out words.
"Come stay with Us."
Very carefully, he gathered every single stone and built a sturdy wall around his shelter. It kept him cool in the days and warm at night. He thought over his answer for a long time.
One night, it rained.
It washed away the dunes that had become so familiar, it washed away most of the stones and the fibers that had protected him. Trembling, he gathered those rocks that remained and carefully spelled out YES, in the newly flattened ground. And then he wept.
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Why did you weep?
Because even though it was horrid, it was what I knew.
When did you?
At night, late, so no one could comfort me. Only for the first week and then I knew it was better.
But at first?
I lost everything I ever knew. It didn't matter what it was.
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They came for him. One at first, then another until there were many. He wasn't sure what he had expected. They were all different shapes and sizes. They were all loud. They were mostly friendly and well intentioned.
The first arrived, like the rocks, suddenly and with cool ease. He was large, the first one, like a mountain and the boy was afraid. Then the man handed him a robe, he wrapped it around himself. Clothes. Yes. Take me with you.
So they went, just walking, but walking had never gotten the boy anywhere before and now they were leaving. The desert had an end. It ended in the ocean, a vast glittering water that made the boy want to drink until he drowned. Instead, the large man took him to a house that was filled with other children.
The other children gazed at him oddly.
"Hello." He said softly to the one who was the bravest. Another boy like his own self, expect this boy looked fiery instead of beaten earth.
"You're the Untapped One."
"Am I? Who are you?"
"Ron."
"Oh...I'm...." He searched, eyes closed, one hand clenching at thin air to pick it out. "Harry. I'm Harry."
And he was. At that moment, he was. And he was the Untapped One and
Ron was a friend. The elderly man, who ran the house came down to greet him then and drew him upstairs and gave him endless drinks of water and told him who he was.
Like a poem scribbled into the sand dunes, Albus wrote a story into Harry's blank canvas. Told him he once had parents, but no more, that they had been special and that had gotten them killed. He'd lived, by some act that no one could explain. Secreted away in the desert to keep him from harm and now here, to learn to defend himself.
"Who?" He asked. "Am I defending myself from?"
"A bad man."
But that was a lie. The biggest lie that Albus ever told the boy. If he had stayed in the desert, he would never have had to defend himself from the bad man. He had to learn to defend himself from everyone. Even people who weren't bad.
Like Ron. Who was the best friend that a lonely desert scarred boy could want, but who couldn't be trusted in the worst times. Like Hermione, who came a little later and was so painfully smart, who didn't always know when to stop asking questions and when to start listening for the answer in the silence. Like his teacher, McGonagall, who loved him and treated him well, but never quite understood what he needed to be understood.
He defended himself from them. Kept the real, the soul of himself, in the one blue rock, the first, that he had taken with him when the large man came for him. In the day time, it stayed in a safe place, a hidden place, but at nights, he took it out and turned it over and over in his hands. It was smooth.
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What's the stone?
I don't know...it just fit in the story.
So it comes from no where?
Nothing comes from no where.
The stones did at first.
But they did come from somewhere, he just didn't know where.
And neither do you.
Silence.
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Defense wasn't all Harry learned. There were endless lessons of all different types, but after years of the desert, Harry longed to be outside and they meant very little to him. He did well enough to please most of the teachers and he learned the slippery nature of truth.
There was one teacher, who did not waver or bend, who could not be coaxed or convinced. The man was tall, dark, stopped a little from years bent over a desk. He was angry when what he taught was not learned. He hated Harry.
The hate was so intense, that Harry never questioned it. Oh, he wondered at it's source, resented it and was afraid of it. But he never questioned the hate. He accepted it as he had everything else. Defended himself against it as best he could and lived with it.
The changeling child too, was to be defended from. Draco, the wildest of the wild bunch who lived in the rambling house by the ocean, he was pale under the strongest sun and harsher then any wind storm. Again, Harry accepted the adulterated anger directed at him, built a wall of rock in his mind and moved on. There were those that were there to help, those to hinder and those to sabotage. The three categories were all Harry needed and he kept on, kept on.
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Was he happy?
Sometimes. But mostly, he went on.
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The Familiar. The bad man. The ugly one, the scarred one, the hideous one, the one who they all lived in fear of....
Harry was sent back to the desert in fear of him. Sent back at regular intervals with his old shelter and his dune to keep him company. It was horrid, it was lonely, the poems he wrote abstracted and harsh.
When they would come to reclaim him, take him in, feed him, water him, talk to him, late in the night he would weep for the sand and not understand it, but accept it. Easier to accept then question. The blue stone rested against his cheek in the night. The already smoothed stone became silky to the touch and as he wept it pulsed a reassuring coolness across his cheek.
The Familiar...
The desert. After six years, he still returned there. Was sent. He had accepted in, quietly mourned his comings and goings. There were no roots in the desert, just as there were none by the ocean. Constantly swept between two impossible infinities.
So six years and he was tired of all of it, tired of the sea, tired of the desert, tired of defending and tired of being afraid.
He called the bad man to him. Called him by his true name and coaxed him from the depths. Getting him there was the hardest part.
When he rose from the dust, part of the land itself, it wasn't hard to finish. They moved in circles around each other, gazes locked and the Familiar, red eyes flashing, properly skeletal hands moving with deadly precision, struck.
But Harry was too well trained, he knew how to shield himself. The Familiar struck again and again, becoming tired quickly and afraid. Soon Harry found a weak spot and he hit it with all the compassion he had for his meals. The Familiar dropped, his breath stopped, the light went from his eyes. Dead.
It was three weeks before they came to retrieve him and found him calmly eating pieces of the body cooked over a fire he wasn't supposed to make. The stares were harsh, but he'd built up all the right walls and they didn't bother him at all.
People said he was a hero. They said he had helped the whole world. He did all the right things, smiled at the right time and shook hands, but inside, he knew he had only done what was right for himself. Albus, Ron, Hermione, McGonnagal, they mattered to him. Even Draco did, in a strange abstracted way, but he hadn't done it for them.
"I wanted to live." He told the rock in the wee hours. "I don't know why, but I did."
Things were less and more complicated after the death. Less because no one was quite sure what to expect next from him, and there was no need for him to return the desert. More because he didn't know what to do and had to figure it out fast. The house by the sea could no longer be a refuge. Ron and Hermione were getting married and building a home along the shore. They told him he could stay, but he was tired of the endless ocean that glittered with promise.
So he went for a walk. It may have been the longest walk he had ever attempted and his life had been one filled with journeys. He walked until his feet cracked and bleed, he walked until the ocean was a distant memory. He walked until he had to sleep, so he just dropped and curled into the warm, sweat soaked cloth of his best robe and slept.
He woke in the forest. It had it's own rhythm, it was filled with shadows. He walked a little farther before he reached a large empty space, where the trees had unaccountably not grown by a brook shore. He had a knife in his pocket, a gift from Draco, as strange, sharp and unexpected as the act of the giving itself. Into the dirt he cut a giant muddy word. HOME
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The woods?
Quiet, safe.
Not *the* Forest.
No. Another one. Not nearly as dark.
Ah.
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With good-byes all around, Harry built a house over the word. His friends helped him build it and it was good sturdy house. It was his. When they all left, retreating the quiet, Harry sighed gently, went inside and cried on the blue stone, rubbing it softly with his fingers.
For work, besides the general upkeep of his house, Harry made things. Furniture, utensils, baskets and carved words in them. He was good at it. Good with his hands after years of living by them. He wrote good words in them, solid words and sold them off to people who really liked them, instead of people who wanted something made by the Tapped One.
It was only late at night, when there was only the stone and the wildlife around him that he felt lonely. The stillness undid him. His friends still visited and they left behind traces of themselves, memory trails, but it wasn't enough.
Just when it seemed that there was nothing to be done, but leave his quiet home in search of a companion, Albus contacted him. The old man seemed drawn, tired, in a way he hadn't in many years.
"Please, Harry, I know you need to be alone now, but solitude may be what's best for him..."
"Who?"
"He's been so distracted lately, out of sorts and then fainting like that..."
"Please, Albus, tell me what's going on."
"During the troubled times, Severus was a spy, he saw some ugly hard things, Harry and I think now they've finally come to haunt him. He can't stand to be touched, never did before, but it's worse now. He fainted when one of the children popped a balloon...I'm making him take a leave of absence..."
"He can come." The words came without check. His teacher, who hated him, despised him, but needed him. After years of it, Harry had learned to like being needed.
The black shadow that arrived was a sliver of the former passionate, fiery man he had once resented. Wiry and so white that it could not even decently be called pale, the man allowed himself to be led to the spare bed that Harry had built himself the week before. He'd carved Protection into it's base, hidden away, but large enough to satisfy himself.
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You put up wards?
Soaked them into the floorboards practically.
Ah.
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Severus barely ate, he slept in fits and he trembled. Harry watched him under cautious sooty lashes and prepared small, filling meals for the both of them. In the night, when the screams woke them both, he would traverse the space between their bedrooms like a cat, swift and silent, to curl around him, lending warmth. Severus would twitch away from him, but slowly, surely, he would return, needing the heat, withstanding touch for it.
They barely spoke, Harry because he had few words left to say, having spilled so many onto the sand all those years ago and Severus, because a few would have caused an avalanche of them.
"Why do you hate me?" Harry had asked once over a meal of bread and beans. Dark heavy eyes fell on him.
"Why shouldn't I?"
Harry didn't sleep at all that night. Over breakfast, eggs, he spoke carefully, measured,
"There are no reasons why you shouldn't hate me. None why you should like me. I've thought about it and you're right."
"Give me a reason." Severus said, suddenly, desperately. The shakes and the nightmares had made him strange, wild, his emotions which had always been fierce and sudden were out of his control. "Give me a reason not to hate you."
"All right." Harry soothed, gently caressing one trembling hand. "I'll try."
And he did. It was a new and complex challenge. He thought of and discarded a thousand and one things. Too many would only be seen as contemptible. Silly. While he thought, he began to build. Like many times when he was creating something important and thinking, the piece ran away from him, doing what it wanted.
Wood bent and gave way under his sharp blade and his mind whirled itself into a dense set of knots. He made meals, he kept an eye on his guest and he thought and he carved and sometimes he slept.
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His fingers were tiring, aching, but it needed to be done. It was coming together. This was the part of the story he cared about, the ocean, the desert, they were necessary for this. For the pain that came from this, the joy. The emotion that had burst from him in a hundred different ways.
He wrote it.
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When the piece was finished, it was a sculpture. Harry had never sculpted before, so it took him by surprise. It was a crude beginning to the medium, grainy and strange. Severus in roughly hewn truth, hair greased and spilling into deeply cut eyes, nose beaky and eye catching, the mouth set in a thin, disapproving line. Every wrinkle sliced into, every flaw alive for the looking. The figure sat on a spiked rock, book open on his lap, stooped forward, eyes focused on some distant figure.
He set it gently aside and took up a solid chunk of wood of a bit shorter and thicker then the first. It came from underneath his fingers faster, finishing in hours instead of days. The image was stronger, easier; one's own mind the closest. It was easy to make the squatting finger, leaning into the dune, a finger in the shifting sands, writing out a single word, poised at the end DESIRED. He situated the two figures on the porch where Severus would not miss them.
Positioned them, so that wooden Severus glared hard at the squatting boy and the boy stared back, his gaze one of acceptance.
"Not good enough." Severus said when he saw them.
"That wasn't the reason." Harry said promptly. "That's what I did while I was working on the reason."
"You're very good at it. The art."
"Yes."
"Do you have a reason?"
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You are good. At the art.
Shh. I'm almost done.
It's late.
Yes.
I'm going to bed.
All right.
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"Yes. Tomorrow."
It was Severus' turn not to sleep. He paced, quietly. Stared into the younger man's bedroom. Went out onto the porch and sank into one of the rocking chairs. It was comfortable. The figures hadn't moved and staring at them propelled him to revisit them. Slow, he approached and leaned over squatting Harry to trace the spilled letters. Desired. Desire. He caught his own rendered glare, saw his determination. Harry had carved him with a will to live.
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It was harder writing the things that he wasn't sure about. He didn't really know what had gone on in the man's head that night, no matter what was said about it later. He could only guess. Safer to leave it. Dipped the quill. Plowed on.
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The sun rose and Harry went with it, puttering around his kitchen. Severus papered the doorway, sank into the chair.
"The reason is," He said softly as he set a plate of toast in front of his silent companion, "that there isn't a reason. You've got to decide what you feel. Nothing I do or so will change it, if it's the way you need to feel. Eat your toast."
Mechanically, Severus ate. And thought.
"Why did you write Desired?"
"Because I want to be." Harry answered promptly. "Because that's all that's missing from my life."
"Why are you naked?"
"Because that's how it was. Black robes are too hot to wear in the desert. I slept on them, used them as blankets at night."
It took a moment before Severus realized that the other man meant it seriously. This had once been Harry's life.
"Ah."
"Can I show you something?" No wait for an answer, Harry was off and when he returned, his hand curled protectively around the round stone. It shone now, from years of stroking hands. It remained cool.
"A rock?" Severus stared.
"It appeared first. There were others. That's how I was invited to live in the house."
Severus reached out a hand and in a moment, realized it was exactly the wrong thing to do. Harry clenched the stone closer, until his knuckles went white, but right before Severus could retract the silent question, he found his palm filled with the smoothed stone.
Harry trusted him with this artifact. This was his most treasured possession and he handed it over without question. Dutifully, he handled it a moment, feeling it's weight. Returned it. Harry took it from him gratefully.
He didn't say it then, but he stopped hating Harry in that moment.
They went on as before, but with less silence. The avalanche that Severus had feared, arrived and when he started talking, he couldn't stop. He let loose a barrage of words, his life, his story, his pain, his joy, everything spewed forth and Harry sat, listened, fed him and made him sleep when it was too much. The flood went on for four days and as if in response, the brook overflowed it's shores, lapping at the front steps.
In the end, when nothing was left. Harry said softly,
"It's over now."
And it was. Everything that had come before was over. What they had been, the lives they had lived before had ended. It was time for something new. Something clean.
Harry practiced rock carving for weeks on any thing larger then a pebble. It was harder then wood, but in some ways more rewarding. When he was sure he had it down to an exacting precision, he took out the cool blue stone, his one constant. It had soaked in every tear, heard every thought. Carefully, gently, he carved a word.
"I want you to have this." It was evening, they had been speaking in low tones about the traps Harry had made, if they were efficient enough. Severus stared at him, silent. Waiting. The stone filled his palm for a second time.
"Harry, I can't take this."
"Look at it."
Reluctant, Severus looked down.
"Harry..."
"Do you accept it?"
A careful finger ran over the chiseled letters. HEART. Harry's heart.
"Yes. Yes."
"Good."
Severus kept the stone as close as Harry once had. Never once did he loose it in all the long years after that night. It was his, a gift, the best he had ever been given and nothing would make him relinquish that.
That night, they slept in the same bed. The one that Harry had carved PROTECTION into. Severus stopped shaking, Harry started making larger meals. They lived together instead of just with each other and over weeks, there were smiles formed and finally, at long last, there was laughter.
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There was, he realized, no way to end the story. He didn't know what happened next. He looked out his window. It was still dark, but just. The whole night had been spent leaning over the parchment. His inkwell was dry, his back ached and his hands were nearly black. Quietly, he slipped into the bedroom and disrobed. He climbed into bed and curled up next to his lover.
In the morning, Severus read over what Harry had written.
"It's good." He said slowly. "It did not happen that way."
"No, but you said to write the story I needed to write."
"Yes. Did it help?"
Harry leaned back against the counter top and stared at his lover. Severus allowed, graciously ignoring the eyes flicking over him.
"How did you know it would?"
"Because I know you. You aren't happy until everything is hashed out. Better to do it on paper."
"Are you happy?" He still wasn't always sure. It was hard. They were both toughened and angry so much of the time it was difficult to believe it would ever get better. And other times....
"Yes."
Harry moved to, sank to the floor to rest his head on one bony knee.
"Yes."
Three long fingers on his cheeks and he sighed in contentment.
I have your heart, Harry Potter. Severus thought dimly. And I will never release it.
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